For technical grounds, a railway line must spread along a flat route. This feature strongly dissociates those roads from the rest of the city when it lies on rugged terrain. Sections on embankment and sections in a pit have been met in the movie, and in the following sequence, the topography again plays a key role. Houses overhang the Railway Path trench; the slope in-between is covered with trees as linear forest. The green line is almost uninterrupted from the countryside to the city centre, allowing animal species circulation from a vast to constraint environment, and thus the existence of wildlife corridors (1). Question biodiversity in a reasoning on the urbanity definition is a way to approach a multitude of sensitive points when it comes to city operation. From the ground waterproofing to the pollination of flowers, from the urban heat island regulation to the contact between human beings and fauna and the linked health concerns, a lot of subjects underline the urban issues of nature. During the sixties, a tool has been invented to fight city sprawls of Bristol and Bath: the Avon green belt. This policy does fundamentally conceptualize the built-up environment and the natural areas as antagonists. This protective limit is today still precious since cities are gaining ground on wild and rural regions. Yet a new vision has surfaced. Among the common modes of urban planning representation, among the buildings and road networks maps have appeared green infrastructure schemes, so that the built and vegetal space are today perceived as interlocked.
In that sense, the Railway Path introduces a city with a contemporary image. The footages only allow a summary observation of the presence of biodiversity on this route, further studies of the benefits and problems induced by this supposed wildlife corridor.
Later is reached the highest point of the surrounding relief, so the path has to continue in a tunnel. It is also a high stage of the route in term of senses: the sound perception changes, the temperature decreases, the field of vision become limited and darker. Expensive and requesting complex means, the tunnel is a facility that seems very urban, or at least is the mark of a highly developed human civilization. Yet this place will also make the one that passes through travel in a primitive world. From the water drops noise to the rock paintings that can be seen, the present sensory world shapes an allegory of the cave.
De retour à l’air libre, la ville se dévoile par la superposition des usages : cyclistes en transit côtoient riverains occupés à tranquillement consommer boissons rafraichissantes. Une grande cheminée se dresse dans le paysage, signe précurseur de la traversée d’une zone industrielle.
(1) Wildlife corridor:
"A wildlife corridor is a functional passing area, for group of species enfeoffed to a same environment, between several natural spaces. This corridor thus links different populations at help the dissemination and the migration of species, as well as the recolonization of perturbated environment." (futura-science.com)
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